NKOTB – the BPP PGCE

The announcement of the new BPP PGCE in the TES yesterday generated a lot of twittering, most of which struck me as knee-jerk in nature, unduly negative, and rather uninformed. Now, given the nature of Robert Peal’s polemic against the educational establishment – which ended by describing all those people who (whether right or wrong) had dedicated their working lives to trying to provide a good education for our children, as a persistent national embarrassment – I’m not overly bothered that criticisms that he only trained 6 years ago, hasn’t even been in the classroom for all of that time, and therefore doesn’t have the necessary experience to run the course, are a bit personal. However, I do think trying to tar the subject tutor team with the same brush is unfair since some of them can count their teaching experience in decades and all those I know anything about have clearly been effective teachers and have thought long and hard about teaching within their subject specialisms.

However, my main issue with a lot of the reaction is the misunderstanding of the nature of the PGCE in relation to QTS and the role of the university and the SCITT. I can forgive anyone for not being able to understand the current complexity of ITE in England – I regularly fail to explain it clearly to prospective trainee teachers myself – but a lot of the negative commentary and questioning clearly assumes that the BPP PGCE is all the training that is provided and I very much doubt that’s accurate.

Now, I don’t know exactly how this new PGCE integrates with the Pimlico-London SCITT so instead of speculating, this is what I do know, based on working with various SCITTs and HEIs.

A SCITT is an accredited ITT provider, based around a school or group of schools and approved by the NCTL to recruit trainee teachers and recommend the award of QTS. As such, it is their responsibility to ensure that all the Teachers Standards are met, that trainee teachers get suitable training (including things like professional expectations, subject knowledge, planning, behaviour training, understanding of SEND issues, assessment and so on) and good support, and that the quality of NQTs at the end of the course is appropriate. Ofsted’s view on this is that all NQTs should be exceeding the Teachers’ Standards at the point QTS is awarded and if Ofsted inspect and conclude that the training has omissions or the NQTs are not good enough, then a Grade 3 (or 4) effectively shuts them down.

All of this relates only to QTS; a SCITT is not a university and cannot award a PGCE, which is a post-graduate qualification, usually at Level 7 with associated Masters credits. Typically the PGCE consists of two or three assignments totalling 12000 words. These will usually include relating practice to theory and may include collecting data from lessons but, importantly, the PGCE is an academic qualification and the grading has absolutely no link to the actual quality of classroom practice of the trainee teacher.

Some SCITTs therefore just do QTS but most have a contract with a university to provide the additional PGCE. This gives the training more kudos and makes it more portable e.g. to Australia. How much input the university has depends entirely on the nature of that contract. Here are some examples that I know exist:

The university train the SCITT tutors to deliver the PGCE and never work directly with the trainee teachers. The university sets the PGCE assignments but the SCITT tutors do the input and mark the work, and the university just moderate the marking and make the award.

The university provide all the teaching and assessment of the PGCE assignments. This might involve the trainee teachers going to the university, or university tutors coming to the SCITT.

The university provide all the teaching and assessment of the PGCE assignments and also some subject-specific training. This is what we do at Southampton. The advantage for the SCITT is just related to economies of scale. A small SCITT may only have 20-30 trainee teachers. Pulling an experienced teacher out of the classroom for every subject, for a dozen days a year, to do subject-specific training, is difficult, whereas a university has enough trainee teachers for there to be someone (like me) in each subject for whom this is the core of a full-time post.

Set against this background, the BPP PGCE model looks perfectly acceptable to me. The university are supplying some training, which is likely to be more subject-specific than the SCITT can provide on their own, and the PGCE assignments, which the SCITT can’t provide at all. The only thing that is a bit unusual is that BPP itself is not an accredited ITE provider and it doesn’t have a track-record, or any intention, of producing education research. I’m not convinced that’s a problem. In some universities, the QTS and PGCE work is done by tutors who have a research element to their contract. In others, like Southampton, there is some overlap but most of the tutors are on teaching-only contracts. I don’t think that reduces the quality of what we do at all.

Finally, PGCE tutors are typically qualified at Masters level, and I think that’s not entirely the case for the BPP PGCE. On the other hand the intellectual capability of the team is clearly strong and it is the university’s job to ensure standards are appropriate, which presumably includes having an external examiner from another university.

So, it’s different in flavour, and it’s sort of starting from scratch. I think the content of ITE generally, and this course in particular, is a legitimate, and very important, area for debate (and helpfully some clear indication of this is already available for English and history). I think knee-jerk responses of “this must be rubbish” because of who it is and how it is set up, are unhelpful. We train 40 000 teachers each year in this country. In that context BPP is a tiny but potentially interesting innovation. Let’s either engage with what they are actually doing (or ignore it, if preferred), and see how it goes.